by J. B. Beatty
“Become a zombie,” I clarify.
“That’s horrible,” says Tammy, raising her hand to her face.
“Do you have any idea where they might be storing their vaccine? Do you know where any of their medical facilities are?”
“I have no idea,” admits Cash. “The hospital is on this side of the fence. There are probably a few medical clinics in the villages on the other side. Maybe that’s a likely place? Wouldn’t they need refrigeration?”
“They could get refrigeration anywhere,” says Carrie. “But my person did say that she had to make a delivery of supplies to a clinic up in Suttons Bay. Maybe that’s a possibility.”
“How can we find out?”
“We need to kidnap someone who knows,” answers Carrie. “Someone higher up in the organization than our girl. Or maybe one of the people they are protecting. One of the vacationers.”
“To do that,” I say, “We’d need to get on the other side of the fence.”
We look to Cash. He shakes his head and rubs his hands on his thighs. “I don’t know how you would ever do it. We’ve had a few people try to infiltrate. They’ve never come back.”
39→SWEAR THEY WAS BEATS AND BUMMERS
We share everything that might be useful to the Resistance except for the location of our bunker. And they share freely with us, without giving us the keys to their network. I’m still not sure if we are considered part of the network or not. Then Cash appears to let us in.
“You need to pick names. Fake names that we can use when communicating with you.”
“Okay, we’ll get back to you on those,” says Carrie.
“No, we really need them now, so we can authenticate any communications coming from you.”
“Ah,” I say. I pound my fist into my hand and point. “I’ll be ‘Blue Zephyr.’ ”
Carrie reels back with a disgusted look on her face. “Why?”
“I think it’s a drink. I just like the name.”
“No can do,” says Cash. “It’s got to be a country singer.”
“Wait… serious?” says Justin.
“Yeah, it’s how things unfolded. If you’re not a country singer, no one in the Resistance is going to reach out to you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” says Carrie. “I don’t even like country.”
Tammy eyes her suspiciously. Cash pats her on the arm. “It’s alright. We’re a Big Tent movement. But we still need you to pick a country handle. I’m sure you have some you like.”
Carrie looks at me, her face perhaps permanently frozen in disbelief. To Cash, I say, “Johnny Cash is taken, right?”
“Obviously.”
“I couldn’t be ‘Johnny’?”
He shakes his head.
“Hank?”
“Taken.”
“Roy Rogers?”
“Taken.”
“I think that’s all I know.”
“That’s three more than I know,” says Justin. “How about you just assign names to us?... Since we have a little bit of a deficit in this genre?”
Cash leans back, looks at Tammy. “Now’s your chance, honey.”
She smiles and leans forward. “You all just relax on this one. I don’t want you to think we’re disappointed. In fact, I was kind of hoping a moment like this would come along someday. Now this is going to strike you as a little old-timey, but my grandfather used to love the Monroe Brothers. And I think that would be perfect for you.”
Justin narrows his eyes and finally says, “I’m not real familiar with them, I admit.”
“Well, that’s where Blue Grass came from! Surely, you’ve heard of Bill Monroe, right?”
Justin blinks.
“He’s the one that went the farthest. You can be him. And you can be Charlie,” she says to me.
Carrie clears her throat. “Which Monroe brother am I?”
“Everyone forgets Birch, because he never did any radio shows or recordings with the rest, but he was very important.”
“Uh huh. Okay.” Carrie nods. “So I am the oft-forgotten country singer Birch Monroe, who was overshadowed by his more successful brothers?”
“Well, Charlie didn’t last long either.”
“What?” I say in indignation.
“But they both were very important in Bill’s formative years,” Tammy reassures us. “Next time we meet, if we have electricity, I could play you some Bill Monroe.”
“Well, that would be jim-dandy,” says Carrie.
“Now that that’s settled, we’ve got to be on our way. My advice to you would be to wait around a few hours before you head out. And if you hear activity in the area, duck right back in. Just make sure you lock that door at the top of the stairs behind you. It’s just one of those little twist-the-knob locks.”
“That’s not very secure.”
“No, it’s not going to keep anyone out, but at least you hear them trying to get in and have a few seconds to grab your guns.”
“Alrighty,” says Carrie.
“Hey,” says Justin. “How do we get in touch with you and the rest of the Resistance?”
“If you have Internet…”
“At home.”
“Then look for our chatroom on MySpace.”
“MySpace?” Carrie widens her eyes.
“Everything else is slowly getting shut down. Big brother’s watching it. But MySpace? From what our people tell us, it’s been completely forgotten. Once you get on there and confirm your identity as the Monroe Brothers, our people will be in contact with some back-up protocols for communication.”
“Wait,” says Justin. “How do we find this chatroom?”
“Oh, it’s easy. It’s called ‘The Resistance,’ and it’s dedicated to some heavy metal band from Sweden…”
“Death metal, honey…”
“For crying out loud, whatever kind of metal. Just go there, and you’ll find lots of posts about whatever kind of crap that music is, but in between, you’ll find the ones that count.”
“Hiding in plain sight.”
“That’s the idea.”
After they leave, Carrie stands up and starts pacing. She seems agitated.
“You okay?” I say.
She turns on me. “Why the hell would I be okay? The world has ended and we must have all died and gone to hell and not gotten the memo.”
“A little dramatic?” cautions Justin.
“A little dramatic? Did anything you’ve ever heard about a zombie apocalypse ever alert you to the possibility that we all have to pretend to be dead country singers in a MySpace chatroom dedicated to Swedish death metal now?”
“When you put it that way…”
“And I’m Birch, the forgotten Monroe Brother!”
40→THE THRILLING, MASTERLY, AND BLOOD-CURDLING
We look at our options—to wing it and attempt a trip to the other side of the fence, or to head back to the bunker, perhaps rescuing Artemis on the way and actually making plans for a successful trip to the other side. We opt for the trip home.
After a quick attempted nap, we set out at 2 a.m. We don’t see or hear any signs of a continuing dragnet for us. It’s possible that our lame attempt at a cover-up worked and they chalked it all up to a soldier freaking out. It’s equally possible that we will all die moments from now in a blaze of gunfire.
We follow the route Cash recommended to get away from town and then we’re on our own after a very slow early going watching for traps. Finally, we get on a paved highway and speed up and I feel like I can breathe again. We don’t have fully-charged batteries, but we are able to make it to a restaurant that stands alone, backed up to a sparse pine woodlot with no houses in sight.
With dawn coming, it looks like our best choice. We enter at the back—the door had already been broken into. No one’s home, and no corpses here. Any food worth taking is already gone, but the electricity’s on still. We start charging our batteries and setting up a place to sleep where we are out of sight of the windows.
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“We need to get a solar charger,” says Justin. “We can’t be ducking into buildings all the time.”
“Just find me an outdoors store, that’s our best bet,” I say.
“Sure thing, Charlie.”
Now that we’ve stopped for the day, the exhaustion hits me. Like all good sleeps, I can’t remember dozing off.
All I remember is the sound of the window shattering. For a moment, I am frozen in place, not thinking clearly. I tell myself it must have been a dream. Then I hear movement. I grab my pistol. Carrie reaches for her rifle.
I turn to Justin but my senses are shocked by a body in the air above me. It lands on me, its arms grabbing at my head, clutching and squeezing and yanking. I hear Justin yelling as I try to push the zombie away.
The arms project crushing strength as they twist at my head. It is not trying to bite me, I realize. It is putting all of its energy into trying to twist my head, to break my neck.
I grab at its arms to try to stop them from prying my head into a direction it is not meant to go. Its breath attacks me and my legs kick out, trying to find something to brace against. I lose track of the struggle but can feel blows as Justin and Carrie try to force it off me.
A torrent of hot liquid hits me, splattering. I taste blood. The body falls onto me: dead weight. Justin pulls it off.
“Are you okay?” he says.
I spit blood out and rise to my elbows. I try to wipe the mess off my face by my hands are bloody, everything is bloody.
“Did he bite you?” asks Carrie, holding a bloody knife.
“No,” I gasp. “No. It was weird.” I roll over and flail around for something to clean myself off with.
“Here,” says Justin, and he stands walks deeper into the kitchen. He returns with paper towels.
I wipe the blood. I keep spitting over and over. The taste and the smell won’t leave me fast enough. Justin readies his rifle and walks toward the window where the zombie busted through.
“What do you mean, ‘weird’?” Carrie says, turning toward me.
“Well, okay, but first, why I am the one who always gets attacked by zombies? Why do I always find myself underneath them, thrashing and pushing and fighting to stay alive, while they breathe their nasty breath at me? Why me?”
Carrie purses her lips as she thinks. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe you present a delectable target? Maybe you need to bulk up? Maybe they sense that you are the key to our operation and they need to take you out first?”
“I’m the key to our operation?”
“No, not at all. Justin is. He’s a nurse and he’s eye-candy. I was just saying that maybe they sense you are the key. But they’re not actually very smart, as far as we know. I think we could call them sentient, though.”
I sit down and dig through my pack. I need a new shirt. Now. I look up at Carrie. “You are wonderful at boosting my self-esteem.”
“Yeah, well, I spent years being the sick girl. I was usually on the receiving end of all that self-esteem shit. I didn’t get any practice at doling it out.”
“You were a bartender, for God’s sake.”
“I was the bartender from hell. I made no one feel better about themselves. I took pride in that.”
Justin walks back to us. “I don’t see any sign that he had any friends. But I don’t like being here with that window busted out.”
“Where are we going to go in broad daylight?” asks Carrie.
“I’d almost feel safer in the woods,” says Justin. “We could hear threats coming. Here, it’s too easy for someone to sneak up on us and to be cornered.”
“We’ve got our bikes and a lot of gear,” I say. “I think we expose ourselves too much in moving it to a perfect place in the woods, especially since we don’t know where a perfect place is.”
“Yeah, that,” says Carrie, nodding.
“Well, then we have to take turns keeping watch,” says Justin.
“Fine,” I say. “Me first. I have a lot of adrenalin bouncing around inside me after my latest attack.”
“What did you mean?” asks Justin.
“Hmmm?”
“What did you mean when you said it was ‘weird’?”
“Oh that. It was weird in the sense that every time I’ve gotten attacked—not a huge survey sample but starting to get respectable—the zombies have been doing everything they can just to get a bite out of me. And yes, sometimes succeeding. Their teeth were always their first weapon. Not this guy…. This guy was using his arms, and he wasn’t trying to bite me. He was trying to break my neck. It was like he knew the moves. You know, like in the movies, when the bad guy just grabs someone’s head and holds their shoulder still and pulls real quick in the opposite direction.”
“They make it look so easy.” Carrie sounds a little jealous.
“Yeah, well, this guy knew the move and he probably would have snapped my neck if you two weren’t here.”
“You’re welcome,” says Justin.
“Obviously. Yes. Thank you. But what I’m wondering is maybe this is a learned adaptation? Since when in a zombie mind does it make sense to break a neck first?”
Carrie leans back on a counter. “Well. I mean, you’re not going to get much of a meal if you’re just trying to steal bites from someone you are battling with. But kill the victim quickly, and you can eat all day. Yeah, that makes sense.”
“Are they capable of learning?” I ask.
She purses her lips again.
Justin says, “I think we’ve been seeing that the ones who survived the winter are smarter. Or if not smarter, they’re certainly better at the business of killing and eating. But I don’t think we have any evidence to say they’re actually adapting. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but evidence is a thing. And we really haven’t seen it yet.”
“Yet.”
The wait is long that day. I keep watch for the longest stretch, and when Justin finally relieves me, I sleep well. The only activity that day—I had seen nothing—is reported by Carrie.
When I awaken, she tells me she saw two deer stroll across the parking lot, acting very casual in an ‘it’s-not-hunting-season’ way. And she saw a drone. It didn’t hover over our restaurant, at least not that she saw. She spotted it after it had passed over, and it continued flying along the road, just above the level of the trees.
“We should shoot them down,” she says.
“They will know our exact location when we do so,” counters Justin. “And they’re a lot harder to hit than you can imagine. We’d be tracked, and the big guns would be here pretty quick. And the real bottom line is, what would shooting them down accomplish?”
“They’d stop hunting us. Plus, I hate them.”
“Yeah, but they probably have a lot more drones than we have of us,” he says. “They can replace a drone. It’s really hard for any of us to get replacements. Any time we risk our lives, it had better be for a really good reason—or a really big payoff.”
41→AN AWFUL PECK OF TROUBLE
We leave early—just after dark. It’s a departure from our SOP* but we are antsy to get back to the bunker. (*=You like how I said “SOP” there? Standard Operating Procedure. We’re all trying to use more military terms now that we realize that we’re soldiers in the world’s smallest army.)
About the bikes. My brainchild. I don’t know if I explained them well before. Obviously, for lots of practical reasons, they are a godsend. We can travel long distances under the cover of darkness and be virtually undetectable. They need electricity, though, so if the power grid ever shuts down, we’re in trouble. Unless we can set up a solar charger somewhere. That’s possible, but now that we’re only out and about in the darkness, the challenge in scavenging parts is readily apparent. It’s hard to see which houses have solar panels when it’s dark out.
But here’s the thing I don’t think I explained about the bikes. There’s this scene in the movie “Breaking Away”—it’s an oldie about teenage boys in Indiana with
bicycles and attitude, back in the days before video games and apocalypses when young people went outside—anyway, this kid Dave is riding behind a semi-truck hitting 60 on the freeway. It’s all joyful and classical music and is an incredible expression of freedom and power.
That’s what we get: this manic feeling of freedom and power. And it’s like there is music in my ears when we ride. The wind itself creates a harmony that weaves itself through the hum of my tires on the pavement. Subtract the truck and add the darkness and the sensation of being liberated from the madness of our end of the world becomes even more palpable. Where there is speed, where the wind streams across my face, there is only hope. Out here on the road, there is no death.
Until there is.
Carrie is riding lead with Justin and I on her flanks, sort of a triangle formation. Justin is wearing night-vision goggles. I can’t stand wearing them on a bike. Carrie and I are both comfortable with the darkness. It’s clear enough tonight and our eyes have adjusted enough that we can see most anything. We certainly can spot branches and trees down in the road in plenty of time to stop.
But we don’t see everything. It happens too quickly for me to process. A dark shape explodes from the right side of the road and throws itself at Carrie. She goes down and instantly, my bike smashes into the pile-up and I feel myself tumbling through the air before landing hard on my shoulder. Carrie screams. I push myself up off the ground to come to her aid but the voltage of pain causes me to collapse again.
Justin has stopped and runs to me, touches my back, and then goes to where Carrie is laying prone on the ground, a zombie trying to tear at her. He pulls it off and punches at it repeatedly. When it stops moving, he reaches for the knife on his leg. I see the flash of the metal as it plunges repeatedly, the reflection of the stars dulled by more blood with each thrust.
Justin rises and surveys the scene. The only sound is a pitiful moaning. My head turns toward Carrie before I realize that I’m the one moaning. She is silent and still.
